Author: Janice Barlow

I am a crazy author with a day job so I can eat. We have 3 greyhound rescues and I am a Chartered Financial Consultant and Life Underwriter. But I will be retiring in 2 years to write full time. My 2 true crime books are on Amazon: "He Should Be Dead" and "Too Brief a Candle" I'm working on my third. We are beach people and we love our church and our beach, in that order. Otherwise, I write, read, do cross-stitch, garden, golf semi-badly, and have the most beautiful grandson in the world. When I'm not doing all that, I have to do my day job. :)

By Janice Barlow “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government” – Milton Friedman AS OUR NATION ROLLS ALONG, it seems that not a day goes by without some new drama hitting the airwaves from Washington. If it isn’t someone being fired or resigning, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to a horrific event, like modifying the Second Amendment because of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, or a tweet-storm from the Commander-in-Chief about North Korea. We…

By Janice Barlow MOST YOUNG PEOPLE DON’T PAY MUCH ATTENTION to history when they are in school. They pay even less attention to it when they hit their twenties and thirties and life becomes something that they actually have to start doing, to an extent. (More so for some than others). It’s not until most people are affected by something personally, a direct hit to their own lives or someone they know, that they reflect on the things that led up to why things are the way they are in…

By Janice Barlow For a while, I was not going to address politics. It just seems to generate dissension among the ranks of those of us who generally espouse the same basic values: smaller government, pro-life, fair taxes, high morals, and most importantly, a shared belief in God. Of note, is how often God seems to be set aside on social media, as people argue politics. Once, a person even told me that his love of his family comes before God, and how dare I even suggest that he is…

By Janice Barlow There is so much anger, so much bitterness, rage, and an underlying feeling of helplessness and frustration with the current administration and Congress. No doubt, it is true that much has gone awry. Many promises have been broken and it’s certain that many more will be. Everyone is pointing fingers, arguing, and wanting heads to roll. I am on board with some of that and have been for some time. How does a man like Mitch McConnell remain in a position of leadership for so long and…

By Janice Barlow FOR THE PAST COUPLE YEARS, the nation has been dividing itself between those who were for, and those who remain against the man who ultimately became the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The lines dividing the voters kept shifting and continue to do so. For the conservatives among us, the narrative should be shifting from NeverTrump to NeverLiberal. Because Trump espouses no real ideology, he often aligns with liberalism anyway. But he won’t be in office forever. One stark truth remains obvious: Those who staunchly…

By Janice Barlow THERE HAS BEEN MUCH ADO about immigration reform since, well, since I can remember. But now, more than ever, people want to see a solution to this ever-expanding issue. And many of them are not advocating amnesty. Amnesty, for the purposes of this article, is allowing anyone who is in the United States illegally, to remain in the United States pemanently, whether citizenship becomes the result or not. To its credit, the Trump administration has stepped up the number of undocumented alien arrests, but to its…

By Janice Barlow ACCORDING TO THE CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS, the history of people lobbying (bribing) Congress for their own causes goes back to 1793. In fact, a detailed time line is available for studying by clicking on the blue words. Right under our very noses, a system of buying off the men and women we voted for is in place and sanctioned by our government. And it’s not just pocket change. The same site used to link the time line above, Opensecrets.org, tracks lobby money given to every politician…

By Janice Barlow LONG BEFORE DONALD TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS CANDIDACY, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), also called the “Dreamer’s Act“, was a hotly contested issue. Most conservatives did not want a free ticket to amnesty for anyone. People who have struggled to become U.S. citizens the legal way would be cheated by those who would be given a pass, simply by nature of their arrival here illegally under the age of 31 in June 2012. Also, if parents were illegals, their birth here would not automatically make them…

By Janice Barlow EVERYONE KNOWS that when someone reacts badly when he is taunted or teased, that it only causes his tormentors to bring it on even more. We all remember back to our school days when those poor kids were relentlessly picked on. Maybe we were one of them. The more the victims reacted by lashing out at their antagonizers, the more the bullies would delight in picking on their easy targets. Last week, journalist Michael Wolff‘s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” flew off the…